MINI’s augmented reality ad

We were surprised last month when we saw augmented reality being done completely in flash. It hasn’t taken too long to go mainstream though. MINI has incorporated it into a recent German language magazine ad campaign. The fiduciary marks actually work quite well with MINI’s established ad format. Visit the ad’s URL and hold the magazine up to the webcam and a 3D model of the MINI Cabrio will appear. They have a PDF of the ad that you can print and use if you don’t have the original. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have cross-platform support.

I got the flash to start by using user agent switcher in firefox on Ubuntu 8.10. But then I saw the pdf was almost all black and figured I would not waste the ink. Also I tired saying I had IE7 on vista and that didn’t work, but IE6 on XP did.

I had to use IE, install an ActiveX control, and install a downloader to download some required DLLs (at least that’s what I think what was happening, I couldn’t read any of it), but it works! It’s fun to play around with. Not flawless, but it does what it says. I printed out the PDF.